Montana’s Bitcoin Reserve Bill Wasn’t a Reserve. It Was a Headline.

Over the past few months, a lot of noise has been made about Montana becoming the first state to launch a Bitcoin reserve. It made the rounds on Twitter. It made the headlines. It made some people feel like we were on the verge of something big.

We weren’t.

I’m the DACC State Representative for Montana, and I actually read the bill. What we had was a half-baked piece of legislation that gave the illusion of leadership without doing the work. And calling it a “Bitcoin reserve” didn’t just stretch the truth—it tripped over it.

Here’s what House Bill 429 really did. It proposed setting up a special revenue account that could invest in “precious metals and digital assets” as long as those digital assets had a market cap of $750 billion or more. At the time, that meant Bitcoin and nothing else. So yeah, technically, it could’ve included Bitcoin. But it didn’t say the state would buy any. It didn’t allocate a single dollar. No strategy. No custody plan. No infrastructure. Just a legal green light for “maybe, someday.”

That’s not a reserve. That’s legislative cosplay.

It failed in February with a 41–59 vote. And it should have. Not because holding Bitcoin is a bad idea. I think it’s smart. But this wasn’t a Bitcoin reserve bill. It was a buzzword bill.

Worse, the way the threshold was set showed how narrow the thinking behind it really was. Pegging the cutoff at a $750 billion market cap and pretending that’s some kind of gold standard just reveals how deep the Bitcoin maxi narrative ran here. You want a good example? Look at XRP. When calculating XRP’s market cap, people exclude the tokens Ripple holds in escrow. But for Bitcoin, we count Satoshi’s untouched coins, the four to five million permanently lost coins, and everything else under the sun. That market cap is inflated by metrics built by Bitcoiners, for Bitcoiners. If you used the same logic for Bitcoin that’s used for XRP and other tokens, its market cap would already be lower. Drop the price under $50K, and suddenly it wouldn’t even qualify under its own bill.

That’s the problem with building policy around one asset and acting like it’s the only thing that matters. It might get you likes on Twitter, but it won’t get you meaningful progress. And it sure as hell doesn’t help consumers.

If we want Montana to lead in digital asset policy, here’s what we need. A bill that actually names Bitcoin if that’s the intent. One that sets standards, allocates funds, and outlines what the state is going to do. One that separates Bitcoin from traditional commodities like gold, instead of mixing them into the same bucket. And most importantly, one that includes real oversight by people who understand what they’re doing, not people who are chasing headlines.

This isn’t just a Montana issue. You could copy-paste this story onto half the states that had “Bitcoin reserve” bills introduced this year. The problem isn’t that the bills failed. It’s that they were built to fail. They weren’t designed to bring the community together. They were designed to create a talking point.

We don’t need more of that. We need a united crypto front. We need inclusive, forward-thinking policy that doesn’t rely on inflated numbers or political vanity projects. And we sure don’t need one guy trying to lead the entire movement while locking everyone else out.

So here’s the lesson. If this bill—or anything like it—comes back again, it better show up with more than just a hashtag. Otherwise, I’ll call it what it is again. Empty.